Share or Beware

Developed in partnership with the Academy of Political Management, Share or Beware is a virtual game that high school teachers can use to introduce lessons on critical thinking and media literacy. The goal of the game is to facilitate discussions about the value of fact-checking, healthy skepticism, and unity in the age of misinformation. The game was launched with media practitioners, media literacy advocates, and senior high school students who shared positive feedback and insights on how to better equip people with the skills needed to discern real news from misinformation and disinformation.

Task

How might we promote critical thinking skills for improving media literacy?

Design

An online multiplayer game on critical thinking and media and information literacy for high school students
Client

Academy of Political Management

Collaborating with advocates

For this project, we collaborated with the 8th Batch of the Academy of Political Management (APM), a capacity-building program for young leaders, and Out of the Box, an organization of media practitioners and media literacy advocates Their initial concept for a game to develop critical thinking skills and media literacy was a social deduction game. APM and Out of the Box focused on identifying the game’s content and desired outcomes while we designed the game mechanics, trying out different platforms that could contain the game.

Designing the game elements and mechanics

We designed the game to mimic popular social deduction games. This ensured that the mechanics would be easy enough to explain while reflecting the reality of how misinformation and disinformation can spread. Players take on 3 roles: Fact-checker who convinces others of the truth; Peddlers who spread misinformation and divides players, or Citizens who are tasked to side with the truth and reveal and eliminate the Players. Accessibility was our priority; we wanted to be able to host the game on a platform that could easily be downloaded, used, and modified by its eventual users. We settled on Google Slides for its collaborative features - teachers could download their own copy of the game and modify the elements as they see fit. Using Google Slides also ensured that the game was future-proof: facilitators could easily change the information that players debate over to ensure that they remained relevant to them. We also recommended that players play over Zoom to take advantage of the private messaging feature for private conversations between the players. This also ensured that players who couldn’t access the Google Slide deck could simply type their responses in the chat.

Improving through playtesting

Share or Beware was prototyped and playtested several times first with the project team to improve the initial game mechanics and learning objectives, and then again with students to improve the overall game design. Initially we were overwhelmed with the feedback that we received but we were able to focus on two priorities: the most feasible to implement and the most beneficial. The final game package includes the game space, comprehensive game manuals, facilitation tips, reflection questions for students, and processing points.

Launch and feedback

During the launch, we facilitated a playthrough of the game with media practitioners, advocates, and students being players. The launch was a success, with the players giving positive feedback about the mechanics and the messages delivered by the game.

"The game is great in exposing some of those fake news strategies, disinformation strategies: [...] appeal to authority, appeal to legitimacy, and 'research' ('Nabasa ko 'yan,' 'Sabi ni ganito.'). Another strategy we saw from the Peddlers is casting doubt, and sometime that's enough for them to sow the seeds of doubt among the citizenry. And [...] we also saw legitimacy by numbers. Kung minsan, ang mga citizens, when they are not equipped with the proper knowledge, they just go with the majority. [...] I think what this tells us is that there's so more to critical thinking than just arming people with the facts. But it's also letting people critically question and helping them critically question, and I like how this game facilitates that critical questioning, and throwing each other critical questions para mag-arrive tayo sa truth, or at least some semblance of the truth." -Yang Villa, APM Advisor

“I really like the game because it helps us to consider our activities on social media. Important in the times because most of us only communicate through online.” - Stussy, Siliman University student

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